Nick Cave’s ‘The Sick Bag Song,’ an Epic Poem Composed on Tour

If you ever find yourself sitting next to the rock star Nick Cave on a plane, don’t be alarmed if he reaches for an airsick bag. He’s probably just going to jot down some song lyrics or other stray thoughts.

“I think we all do it, don’t we?” Mr. Cave said in a recent interview in Manhattan. “You’re on a plane, and you need a piece of paper, and you reach for a sick bag.” He was perched on a small couch in a dimly lit dressing room at Florence Gould Hall a few hours before giving a public reading of excerpts from his new book, “The Sick Bag Song.”

The origins of “The Sick Bag Song,” an epic narrative poem about his travels across North America, are somewhat evident in its title. He started working on the book last year, when he was on a plane to Nashville at the start of a 22-city tour with his alternative rock band. Inspiration struck, and he grabbed a bag from a seat-back pouch and scribbled down some lyrics.

“I started to write a long song, and at some point or another it exploded into something else entirely,” said Mr. Cave, who was born in Australia and lives in Brighton, England. “Suddenly I realized I was writing something I didn’t have to sing, that I was writing poetry, which frightened me, because I’ve always held up poetry as something loftier.”

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Mr. Cave performing in Indio, Calif., in 2013.CreditChad Batka for The New York Times

This happened throughout the tour, on flights to Louisville, Denver, Seattle, New Orleans and New York. Before long, he had amassed a collection of poetry that formed the backbone of a restless, rambling narrative that Mr. Cave’s publisher describes as being “somewhere between ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.’ ”

With “The Sick Bag Song,” Mr. Cave is experimenting with a new literary form — a mash-up of prose, poetry, song lyrics and autobiography — and testing a fairly new marketing strategy. “The Sick Bag Song,” which was published last week, isn’t available in bookstores or at Amazon. Mr. Cave is marketing it directly to fans through thesickbagsong.com, an approach that has worked with music for bands like Radiohead and video downloads for the stand-up comedian Louis C.K. The book contains full-color images of airsick bags covered in Mr. Cave’s spidery, crooked cursive. It is only available as a bundled print, digital or audiobook, narrated by Mr. Cave, for around $45. Limited deluxe editions, which include a pressed vinyl LP, audiobook and actual airsick bags customized by Mr. Cave — a news release notes that the bags are “fully functional” — cost around $1,100.

“It’s a radical thing to put out a book that’s not in bookshops,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether it’s a workable idea.”

“The Sick Bag Song” zigzags from Mr. Cave’s childhood memories to intimate moments from his marriage to unvarnished behind-the-scenes episodes from the life of a rock musician. There are hallucinatory, dreamlike passages, including one section involving a tiny dragon, and homages to his literary heroes — poets like John Berryman, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.

He writes about procrastination, loneliness and creativity, as well as more prosaic things like throwing up mussels and a soft pretzel in an alley and dying his signature inky black hair in a hotel bathroom in Milwaukee. “I carefully concoct a paste in a bowl and I paint my hair black,/So that it sits like a sleek, inky raven’s wing/On top of my multi-story forehead,” he writes. “The bathroom light is brutal./ I reposition my face so that I stop looking/Like Kim Jong-un and start looking more like Johnny Cash/Or someone.”

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The limited edition of Mr. Cave's new book, which includes an LP and airsick bags he designed.CreditThe Sick Bag Song

The novelist Hari Kunzru, who appeared onstage with Mr. Cave in New York at a promotional event for “The Sick Back Song,” said that the unhinged lyricism reminded him of poets like Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Mr. Berryman.

“He’s a properly literary creature,” Mr. Kunzru said. “We’re not talking about embarrassing Jim Morrison-type poetry. This is quite achieved, and deserves to be taken seriously by people who might be snobby about the fact that it’s written by a musician.”

Mr. Cave’s artistic angst and fear of losing his creative edge become a focal point of the narrative. In one section, he lists 36 causes of procrastination, including “HBO,” “making unnecessary lists,” “the Internet working” and “the Internet not working.” In another, he recounts a fraught conversation in which the singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry, lounging in a swimming pool, confesses that he hasn’t written a song for three years and has more or less given up trying. “I feel slightly guilty about revealing that in the book,” Mr. Cave said.

He’s equally hard on himself as a songwriter. “The Sick Bag Song” has lyrics embedded in the narrative, scattered verses of songs with self-aggrandizing names like “King-Sized Nick Cave Blues,” but they can seem flat and contrived next to the linguistic pyrotechnics of his poetry. “The comic conceit about two of those songs is that they’re not very good,” Mr. Cave said.

A few hours later, he was brimming with confidence again, pacing the stage of a packed Florence Gould Hall like a restless street evangelist. He was bathed in a cold light that made his blue-black mane even bluer.

“And I will walk onstage at Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tenn., and become an object of great fascination to almost no one,” he said, reading from the book. “The dazed crowd will drift back and forth across the fields and the sinking sun will flood the site with orange fire. After the show, I will sit outside on the steps of our trailer and smoke.”